$18,000,000 for website redesign. Obamas big pimpin
 

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/...ampaign=visits


This has to be a joke right?

yeah, spend 18mil to track spending, sounds about right

Thats obama for ya...

gotta love the USA :disgust

That's fucked up.

18 mil for a website, that companies profits just went sky high

Smartronix will probably sub-contract it to some kid in India for $200. Nice profit.

LOL i bet it will be flash design :D

Go Obama Go !!

THAT is change we can believe in.

From what it looks like, the money isn't just being spent on design but also on things like upkeep, hosting, in-house staff costs, data entry, data gathering, etc.

yaa but $18mILLLL :upsidedow That's like 5x what I make per month, insane :1orglaugh

So $18 mil including hosting and upkeep? How'd he figure out the future costs of the site, this has to be a figure to just set it up.

The $18 million is the budget for the site until 2014.

As for figuring out future costs... every single government project has projected costs, according to which it is given a budget. You didn't think the government just does stuff on a "pay as you go" basis, did you?

Holy fucking christ. That's ridiculous.

Good time to be a web developer when the government pays that kind of shit for it. Too bad they have a whole extension to work with or I'd try to sell them some $500 domains for $50,000.

so fucking lame ..

Why don't they put AdSense ads or sign up for some porn affiliate programs, then they will make their money back.

I don't understand why government websites don't do this. They get tons of specific traffic.

so, its nice

18 mil will set up a nice Tube site indeed.

I would run it for 1/2 of that.

What a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.:(

Fucking stupid.:disgust

WTF?:mad:

Why do you feel the need to explain something that is UTTERLY RIDICULOUS?
Like the frenzy the media went to explain a funny picture that seemed to show Obama looking at a woman's butt?

Somehow I doubt Obama was sitting there wondering what sizeable number he could drum up for a new site just to tick people off....

Anyway, governments have been over spending on stupid crap like this for eons, happens in every administration.. hell, they made a joke of $40,000 toilet seats in Independance Day.

Here in Ontario they spent over $200,000 to come up with this:
http://www.northernlife.ca/images/ontario_logo.jpg

That being said, if he is or is made aware of that, he should step in to put a stop to that kind of spending on things that just should not cost that much.

only USA...

What did London pay for that Olympics logo? Just under $1,000,000 wasn't it?

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/200...PA_228x318.jpg

As government projects go so will this one.

It will not be complete til 2016 and cost will balloon to at least double that.

18 mil for 5ye budget sounds pretty normal.

I one time before internet bubble burst I was consulting for one Fortune 40 Co, by my rough and modest calculations just by judging how much staff have been employed to support that company's site i came up with +100k dollars per week, propably spending that much for much longer than single year.

lets say you have staff of 20 people supporting a website on all levels, from designers, admins to accounting and execs.
lets just assume that 15 of those people make 50k/y and other 5 make 100k/y
15*50k=750k
+
5*100k=500k
-------------
1.25mil/y only for HR expenses
add equipment, real estate, PR, advertizing and a bit of profit and you easily get plus or minus 5mil/y spending budget.

you mean 1000x you make per month? :upsidedow

Ill build them a few sites and a tube for that price

and then install CCBTools for them as a recruitment tool! :P

Minus the fact that someone is already giving the public the same thing for free and its only costing them 600k. And they are probably turning a profit.

yeah but from the article we know only 4 variables: 18mil, web site, 600k, similar technology

based solely on these factors there is no way to determine if 18mil budget is over and through the roof. we don't know how similar is the technology, we don't know what are the requirements nor we do not know how much resources are allocated the project. half of people on gfy never dealt in corporate business and probably very few dealt with government projects if any - and all act like experts that from these 4 variables it is determined that project is blown out of proportions cost wise - maybe yes or maybe not.

you cannot take 18mil put together with word "website" and say wow that's just crazy I can build 18,000 tubes or more for that cost. we don't have enough data to make any kind of logical conclution, just half-thought out assumptions.

Fair enough :thumbsup

It's obvious to me that you idiots have never dealt with a consulting firm or run a really large mainstream site. I am not really defending the spending... but $18M for a 5 year contract to build, service and maintain a website like recovery.gov is fairly common in the corporate world. About 9 years ago (right before 9/11) I was being payed almost $20k/month to build and run a site for Herman Miller and that didn't include hosting or data entry.... and I beat other bidders by almost 50% by bidding $125/hour @ 160 hours/month. $18M over 5 years is $1875/hour based on full time hours (160/month). If you add a couple of developers, hosting, equipment, data entry people and managers to run the project... those numbers are reasonable.

Is it my sick mind or are there two people fucking in thie logo ?

18 million for something we dont need is reasonable?

18 million to give the illusion that obama is for transparency while democrat leaders continue to block 1207? :1orglaugh

I guess its not that bad then.

Ugh, I need to leave this fucking country, permanently this time.

First of all... you should learn to read a little more closely... I clearly said I was not defending the spending... only making the point that the $18M figure was not an outlandish amount for the project.

H.R. 1207 is a political ploy with a great sounding name (it uses the "Transparency" buzzword). All it proposes is that the Comptroller audit the Fed and make a report to congress by a specific date in 2010 while striking audit exemptions from Title 31. The entire amendment is a paragraph long. It doesn't say anything about what Congress should do with the report... what the purpose of such an audit would be or anything like that. It is pure political theatre... if Ron Paul really wanted to introduce a worthwhile bill he should have added those details.

18 million for unneeded project is outlandish.

How can you know what to do with the audit when nothing is known about the FED and what the audit will find?

However, the constitution already says what should be done. It is rather simple. No need to bog down the bill with details that are already law :2 cents:

The comptroller does regular audits... I wouldn't exactly call that "nothing is known".

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/

http://www.federalreserve.gov/genera...faq/faqfrs.htm
btw... I posted support on ADX for Ron Paul's bill on Feb.18, 2009 but have changed my mind about it because the purpose isn't clearly defined. The amendment should at least state a purpose and it doesn't.

The bill is very clearly defined.

pfft I don't even open photoshop for less than 20mil :1orglaugh

it includes maintaining it for years, probably servers and bandwidth to handle a ton of traffic as well.

this is REALLLLLLLLLL???????????

Never saw such bad shit for logo

That's a guy having sex with a dog, best I see it.

I see Lisa Simpson on her knees sucking cock

that's a lot of $$$

damn...fuck you obama